There are certain words — large, beautiful, buoyant words — weighed down by a heavy religious inheritance that make the nonreligious among us uneasy. Soul is one of them — a word whose secular redemption is more needed than ever. (Redemption, it occurs to me, is another — one which David Foster Wallace successfully secularized.)
But hardly any word is more unnerving yet more urgently needed today than mercy — a word steeped in scripture yet almost biologically encoded into human nature; a word deceptive in its seeming softness, for beneath its surface radiance lurks a dark core: the very concept of mercy only exists because of and as a counterpoint to our capacity for cruelty. Mercy is the conscious choice to be kind when one can be cruel — without cruelty, there is no mercy.
This is why the redemptive and rebellious practice of mercy is so immensely needed today, in a world that serves us evidence of cruelty daily, and its practice is what Anne Lamott sets out to reclaim in Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy (public library) — a slim, powerful book about the ways in which we harden against life and the ways in which we can soften through forgiveness, kindness, and all those splendors of spirit which, in denying others, we deny ourselves.
[For more of this story, written by Maria Popova, go to https://www.brainpickings.org/...rediscovering-mercy/]
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